Manitoba a Goth kid?

Everyone keeps saying Manitoba is on the outs with its fellow western provinces – excluded from transportation talks and left out of a recent trade barrier deal. Manitoba keeps getting painted as the sullen Goth kid at the back of the class who gives everyone the silent treatment.

Says who? Where’s this coming from? Is it really true? I thought Manitoba was moderately obsessed with removing trade barriers and doing side deals with other provinces. Seems like some boring press release is issued every few weeks touting such things. I dunno about other reporters, but in the Doer days, a familiar pattern began to develop that involved him talking about trade barriers and worker mobility agreements, me thinking "what the hell ARE those things, exactly?" before my eyes glazed over and I started thinking about why some NDP staffer doesn’t smooth down Chomiak’s hair before he goes on camera.

It just doesn’t jive. Until someone shows me a burn book where Alberta and Saskatchewan have written down all the reasons Manitoba is super-lame, I am not taking this too seriously.

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About Mary Agnes Welch

Mary Agnes Welch joined the Free Press in 2002, first covering city hall and then the Manitoba legislature before moving to her current post as public policy reporter.
Before Winnipeg, she worked at the Windsor Star and the Odessa American, a small daily newspaper in West Texas. There, in addition to covering more than 20 counties, she took high school football scores from coaches all over West Texas by phone every Friday night.

Mary Agnes is a graduate of Columbia University’s journalism school. She has been part of two teams of reporters nominated for a Michener Award. In 2011, 2012 and 2013 she was nominated for a National Newspaper Award in the beat category.

She was a Southam journalism fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College in 2012-13, where she studied indigenous issues, urban planning and political science. She is also the former national president of the Canadian Association of Journalists and has served on several boards.

She once misspelled "Shih Tzu" in the paper and received 37 emails from angry dog-owners.